Sunday, August 21, 2016

The
word “Samaritan” is one of those biblical words that has come into our language
and is even used by people who have never read the Bible it all. The fact that we have this word, and it is
usually preceded by the word “good,” – the “good Samaritan” – is a testimony to
the influence of Jesus even among unbelievers.

Most
people know that a “good Samaritan” is someone who helps someone else, a
volunteer, sometimes a person who just happens to be on the scene and gives aid
to another person. Maybe there’s someone
choking in a restaurant, and a stranger gives him a squeeze and dislodges the
food from the victim’s windpipe. Or a good
Samaritan might be the guy who is seen changing the tire for someone on the
side of the road.

There
are good Samaritan vans that help motorists, good Samaritan centers that feed
the hungry, and even good Samaritan laws that protect people from being sued
for doing a good deed in an emergency.

In
the modern, secular world, most people think about the word Samaritan in that
way: as a good guy.

But
to those listening to the story, the Samaritan is not a good guy, not a beloved
person. And this is an important part of
our Lord’s story. For at that time, a
Samaritan was a hated person. He was an
outcast. If you associated with him, you
were afraid that some of his unpopularity might rub off on you. You avoided and hated Samaritans. You made fun of them and told jokes about
them. They were certainly not the heroes
of any stories.

This
is part of what makes our Lord’s parable so utterly remarkable. Jesus is like no storyteller in history. For He is the author of history itself.

This
story came about because of a lawyer’s question, a man who would have grown up
hating Samaritans. He wants to know what
to do to inherit eternal life. Lawyers
know that inheritors don’t do anything.
You inherit stuff by virtue of the kindness of the deceased person. So he asks a flawed question. Maybe he is trying to trick Jesus. There was a lot of that going on in those
days. “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit
eternal life?”

Our
Lord answers the lawyer by asking him to recite the law and to interpret it. And the lawyer knows the law. You can have eternal life by keeping the law:
love God and love your neighbor as yourself. So Jesus matter-of-factly tells the man to do
that. Jesus tells him to just be perfect
and it’s all good: “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”

But
the lawyer misses the point. He should
have said: “But I can’t be perfect! I
fail to keep the law!” And he would not
have been far from the kingdom. But
instead, “desiring to justify himself,” our proud lawyer, “said to Jesus, ‘And
who is my neighbor?’”

For
if you can narrow the definition of “neighbor,” you can make it easier to keep
the law. If you are only required to
love your family and friends, that’s a lot easier than loving strangers, or even
enemies. So the lawyer seeks a loophole.

Jesus
does not deal in loopholes. Instead, the
lawyer gets a story that has changed the world.
And this is that story:

A
guy gets robbed and beat up. A priest
sees the victim bleeding in the street, and ignores him. A Levite, that is, a
priest’s helper, also sees him and ignores him. And then comes the Samaritan, the dirty
foreign half-breed that we have been taught to hate, mock, and avoid for as
long as anyone can remember. And this
filthy Samaritan “had compassion.” “He
went to him and bound up his wounds” and administered medicine. He transported him to an inn. He paid for his lodging. He promises more money if it is needed. He promises to come again.

And
Jesus asks the loophole-seeking lawyer is own question: “who is the neighbor:
the priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan?” Our lawyer cannot get out of it. He has been backed into the corner. He answers: “The one who showed him mercy” –
because he can’t even bear to say: “the Samaritan.”

“You
go and do likewise,” says Jesus. He
calls the selfish and proud lawyer to repent and to love his neighbor.

But
Jesus is telling another story between the lines. In the kingdom of God, the Samaritan, the one
who is hated, the one who is accused of being illegitimate, the one who is the
enemy of the priests and the Levites and the lawyers, is the One who is good: the
One who shows mercy.

Jesus
is the Good Samaritan. Though hated by
the priests, he shows mercy. Though
reviled by the Levites, he blesses but does not curse. Though He is beaten to death through a corrupt
legal system, He applies the medicine of immortality: His very body and blood
and healing Word – to a world that hates Him. Though He is nailed to a tree and offered vinegar
to drink, He is the one bearing oil and wine, who binds up our wounds of sin and
suffering and death, offering Himself as a ransom. He transports us from the broken road of sin
and suffering to the inn of eternal life. He pays for our lodging with His very own
lifeblood, shed upon the cross, and shared within the chalice. He promises even more, as His treasury of
mercy is limitless. And indeed, He
promises to come again.

He,
who was rejected by this world, by His nation, by the priests and the Levites
and the scribes and the lawyers, He shows mercy, even where the Law is
merciless toward us, where the Temple sacrifices in and of themselves do not
save us. This Samaritan, this Savior, is
the only one who is “good,” for “His mercy endureth forever.”

Indeed,
dear friends, our Lord is the only truly Good Samaritan, who saves us in our
greatest need, who rescues us in our moment of our most fearsome peril. He takes the wrath of God that we deserve, and
exchanges it for the eternal reward that we don’t deserve. He does this out of love and mercy for each
one of us. This is a cause of rejoicing,
dear friends. We do not need a loophole,
because we have a Savior. We do not need
to justify ourselves by manipulating the Law, because He has justified us by manumitting
us by grace.

Yes,
indeed, dear friends, let us rejoice in our Good Samaritan, our good and
merciful Savior. “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see!” Amen.

In the name of the Father
and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

Sunday, August 14, 2016

When
something is really important, we say that it is a “matter of life and death.” Christianity is of the highest importance of
anything in this world, and St. Paul calls it a matter of death and life, “For
the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”

The
way the world works, you start out alive, and end up dead. You do anything and everything to stave off
death, for you love your life, and will do anything to save it. But according to the Spirit, we are born dead
(in sin), and end up alive (in Christ). At the first opportunity, we take a child and
drown his or her sinful nature in Holy Baptism, making the child a disciple and
killing off the Old Man so that a New Man might arise in its place. And our Lord Jesus says that whoever loves his
life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Christ’s sake will find it.

And
though we Christians understand the death of a Christian to be a portal to eternal
life, we, unlike the world, don’t see death as a part of life, a friend, or the
solution to a problem. No indeed, we
Christians see death as a vile enemy, but, a conquered enemy, a defanged tiger,
a grounded dragon, a subdued foe.

Indeed,
the letter of the Law kills. It kills
our pretensions and claims to righteousness. It kills our hypocrisy and dishonesty with
ourselves. It kills any hope of
salvation through works. And once the
sinful flesh has been put to death, this flesh is restored, just as Jesus restored
the flesh of lepers, restored sight to the blind, restored hearing to the deaf,
and restored speech to the mute. As St. Paul says: “Now if the ministry of
death, carved in letters of stone, came with such glory that the Israelites
could not gaze at Moses’ face because of its glory, which was being brought to
an end, will not the ministry of the Spirit have even more glory?”

The
apostle tells us that the “ministry of righteousness” given by the Spirit under
the Gospel is of greater glory than the “ministry of condemnation” given under
the Law.

So
we Christians start off dead and end up alive by the Spirit, who is the “Lord
and giver of life.” And yet we are
surrounded by a kind of walking dead in this world, people whose bodies function
but whose spirits are not made alive by the Spirit. We are surrounded by a culture of death in
which the solution to pain is euthanasia, the solution to unplanned pregnancy is
abortion, and the solution to conflict is murder.

We
look around at our shrinking churches and the growing hostility to the faith. Christians are forced to take part in antichristian
ceremonies, children are forced to bear with the opposite sex in their
restrooms, the elderly must live in fear of being declared a burden and put to
sleep like a sick pet, Christians are threatened around the world by militant
jihadists, and the popular culture mocks us, marginalizes us, and draws our
children into secularism and selfishness.

But
hear anew the promise of the Prophet Isaiah, dear brothers and sisters: “The
ruthless shall come to nothing and the scoffer cease, and all who watch to do
evil shall be cut off.” “For when he
sees his children, the work of My hands in his midst, they will sanctify My
name; they will sanctify the Holy One of Jacob and will stand in awe at the God
of Israel.”

These
are promises of hope, dear friends, and they were first given to the people of
God who were held captive in Babylon, defeated by their enemies, enslaved,
force-fed a new language and a new culture, and kept by military might from
ever going home. And yet, the Lord uttered
these promises to these very people.

These
words have been fulfilled, and will be fulfilled, in, and by, our Lord Jesus
Christ.

In
our Gospel, our Lord is brought a victim: a victim of sin, of death, and of the
devil, a man whose body bears the scars of the Fall, not only marked for death,
but impeded by silence, by the inability to hear and to speak. In his distress, this poor man from the
Decapolis cannot cry out to Jesus for help. He cannot hear the word of Absolution, the words
of forgiveness, the words of the Gospel.
He cannot hear the words of the prophets and the words of promise of
hope. Moreover, he cannot speak words of
prayer, words of praise, words of thanksgiving. There is something of death in his prison of
silence.

But
Jesus has come to rip the prison doors off the hinges, to burst the very bars
of the portal to the grave, and to blast open the gates to heaven itself. That which has been silenced is to be
heard. That which has been slammed shut
is to be flung open. That which has been
condemned to death is to be restored unequivocally to life.

“And
taking him aside from the crowd privately, He put His fingers into his ears,
and after spitting touched his tongue. And
looking up to heaven, He sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be
opened.’”

And,
dear brothers and sisters, look at what was opened: his ears to hear the
condemnation of the Law and the forgiveness of the Gospel; ears to hear the
words of the prophets, the words of Christ, the words of the apostles, the
promises of God and the assurance of the resurrection! And what else was opened? His mouth was opened, “his tongue was released,
and he spoke plainly.” His mouth was
opened to thank His Lord and Master, to praise His God and Savior, to tell his
neighbors the good news of his restoration, to sing, to pray, to praise, and to
give thanks unto the Lord, even as the Psalmist prays: “O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth shall declare Your praise.”

And
what’s more, heaven was opened to this man as the sin-induced closure was unobstructed.
Righteousness was opened because the
impediment to hearing the Gospel was taken away. The path to victory over evil was opened as
the Word of the Lord, delivered by Word and by earthly element, presented by
hands, and testified in Scripture – broke through the oppressive silence with
the Word of Life.

And
the same miracle happens to us, dear friends. For sin closes us up, turns us in
on ourselves, shuts our ears to the Word of God, and clogs our mouths so that
we do not pray, praise, or give thanks. In reflecting on this miracle from our text,
the great preacher St. Ambrose noted: “In this way the minister is now touching
your ears, that your ears may be opened to this sermon and exhortation.”

And
so, once more, my dear brothers and sisters, this “Ephphatha” that you hear yet
again in the Aramaic language of Jesus, in the very sound that reverberated in
the ears of this man from the Decapolis twenty centuries ago, this “Be opened”
is not my word, and not my command. It
is rather the word of Jesus. It is a
command that not even Satan himself can silence. Hear this word, dear people of God, “Ephphatha,
that is, be opened.”

And
by the power of Christ, may your ears be opened to the Holy Word, and may your
mouths be opened to receive the Holy Sacrament, and may your tongues be
loosened to sing the praises of Him who won eternal life for you at the cross,
and may all of our tongues confess and profess ever more zealously and boldly
that our Lord “has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the
mute speak.” And let us add that He has
saved us from our sins and given us the gift of new and everlasting life.

Ephphatha! Be opened! It is a matter of death and life. Amen.

In the name of the Father
and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Like
all days in which we celebrate the Divine Service, today is a day of
remembrance. For our Lord said, “Do this in memory of Me.” And so we do this in remembrance of Him. On this day, we also remember the words of
our Lord, “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his
cross and follow Me.” Moreover, we don’t
just remember these words, we hopefully live them out, and hopefully we call to
mind and honor our faithful brothers and sisters who did just that: who took up
their cross to follow our Lord, and who lost their lives in order to save them.

On
this date, one thousand six hundred and fifty eight years ago, our dear brother
in Christ, the Deacon Lawrence of Rome, lost his life in order to save his
life; he took up His cross and followed our Lord to the grave and to heaven.

In
times past, dear friends, we have had the luxury of viewing the Christian
martyrs as interesting tidbits of history, safely removed from our lives as we
sit on comfortable couches in air conditioned rooms with no thought that we
ourselves might be called upon to offer our blood as martyrs.

But
no more.

More
Christians are being martyred today than in the days of the ancient
Romans. Islamist jihadists routinely
slaughter Christian people in the Middle East, and now in Europe, and perhaps
soon, in the United States. We certainly
hope and pray to be delivered from this scourge. But, dear friends, we must understand what it
means to bear the cross.

St. Lawrence was a beloved servant of the church, the head deacon in Rome. And when the emperor began yet another
systematic extermination of the Christians, and after the bishop of Rome had
been killed, the government came after the head deacon. Since deacons were responsible for overseeing
the church’s charity, Lawrence was ordered to turn over the treasures of the
church to the government.

After
a short delay in which the deacon quickly gave everything to the poor, he was
asked to produce the treasures of the church.
St. Lawrence brought in the poor of Rome, and told the government that
this was the church’s treasure, the poor, the people in need, the people whom
the Church had given the treasure of Jesus Christ and the Gospel.

For
his insolence, Deacon Lawrence was tortured to death on a hot gridiron. As the legend goes, he was defiant to the
very end, even telling his tormenters that they could turn him over because
this side was done. It was remembered
that St. Lawrence went to his death with joy, knowing that he did indeed lose
his life for the sake of the Gospel, and thus saved his life for eternity,
being a baptized and forgiven sinner made new by the blood of the Lord Jesus at
the cross.

In
his ministry, the deacon likely assisted the bishop at the altar, very likely
bringing the chalice of the Lord’s blood to the lips of the parishioners, these
very treasures of the church, with the words: “The blood of Christ.”

And
so we remember the blood of Christ, the blood of St. Lawrence, and the blood of
Christian martyrs ancient and modern, even as we receive the same blood of
Christ and hear the same Word of God, the same teaching of Jesus, the same
Gospel on this day of remembrance.

And
we not only remember St. Lawrence, but we treasure his example of service, his
courage, his mercy, and his witness of the faith.

In
a day and age in which boys want to emulate LeBron and girls look up to Beyonce
as a role model, we do well to remember and teach about brothers like Lawrence
instead, and sisters like Perpetua – heroic men and women whose blood testifies
to the blood of Christ, whose crosses are mirrors directing all of us to the
very cross of the Lord Jesus Christ.

For
when it comes to remembrance of Christian saints, we not only remember them in
the way of history, but knowing that we will meet them in eternity. We will see them face to face. We will talk to them. We will join with them, side by side, in
worship of Him who lost His life in order to save our lives.

For
our lives have been saved through Christ’s cross and blood, even as St.
Lawrence has been given the crown of everlasting life by grace and through
faith. And even as we look to the past
to the heavenly birthday of Lawrence on this date, and even as we look toward
eternity future to our joyful reunion with St. Lawrence and all the saints, we
are present here, in this holy place, taking up our cross and confessing the
Lord’s cross, perhaps one day to shed our blood, but certainly to receive the Lord’s
blood.

We
may never be put to death for the sake of the Lord, but certainly the Lord was
put to death for the sake of us men and our salvation. And in life or death, in good times and in
bad, in joy and in sorrow, we, like St. Lawrence, are witnesses, martures
in the Greek, we whose lives are testimonies to our Lord and His Gospel.

We
thank our Lord not only for the blessings of St. Lawrence, the courageous
martyr, but we also thank Him that we are indeed the treasury of the Church, so
beloved of the Lord that He would deny Himself, take up His cross, shed His
blood, and lose His life for our sakes, and for our everlasting life.

I was present for the August 10 council meeting and was
hoping to speak. However, as the
ordinances concerning ride-sharing were delayed, it turns out that my 17-mile
drive each way across the river and my entire morning were wasted. It is my understanding that this has happened
repeatedly, and for people who work multiple jobs, this makes it very difficult
to have a voice in government. And so I
am writing this letter to you instead. I
may still address the council at a later time.

I have served as the pastor of Salem Lutheran Church in
Gretna since two weeks before Katrina. As with many other people, the
skyrocketing cost of health insurance and other expenses has resulted in my
accepting several jobs to make ends meet.

I have driven for Uber since November of last year, and
with Lyft since they began operations in our area. Ride-sharing enables me to work a flexible
schedule and still carry out a full-time ministry serving my congregation and
my family.

Ride-sharing provides many benefits to our parish and to our
community. Most important is keeping
drunk drivers off the road. I have given
more than 800 rides and have excellent ratings.
A majority of my customers have been drinking (they are mainly tourists,
conventioneers, and college students).
In particular, my younger passengers often drink excessively, and it is
not only money in my pocket, but also a community service to make sure they are
not on the road. I believe quite firmly
that if Jefferson Parish regulates Uber and Lyft out of Jefferson Parish, many,
if not most, of these young people will not call cabs. They will get in their cars and drive. Their
entire culture is lived out through technology.
They are used to very short wait times and being able to track their
driver – as well as to rate their driver, and to know what they are paying up
front, paying by phone app, and all without the suspicious use of a meter. As a rule, they loathe taxicabs.

Studies have proven that Uber and Lyft significantly
diminish drunk driving and thus save lives.
I urge you not to regulate us out of business and thereby cause the
unnecessary deaths that would inevitably result.

This is also an issue of liberty. For example, in my ministerial duties, I fly
to other locations to speak and teach. I
have never been picked up at the airport by a cab. Instead, someone from the
church will come and get me at the airport – a person whom I have never
met. There has been no drug test,
background check, vehicle inspection, or check of driving record. As an adult, I can choose whose cars to get
into. It is not the business of
government at any level to tell me with whom I can ride, or whom I can
drive.

Ride-sharing is the wave of the future. It is now possible and thriving due to
technological innovation and the business culture of peer-to-peer marketing. Government is not our nanny or our parents. As the namesake of our parish wrote in the
Declaration of Independence, government exists in order to secure our rights
and to protect our liberties. It is the
duty of parish government – and all government – first and foremost to respect
our freedom – which includes our freedom to travel and our liberty to engage in
free trade.

I would also like to add that given that I am using my
personal car – the one in which I drive my wife and children – there is greater
incentive for me to maintain and keep my car clean. I am routinely told by
passengers that Uber cars are cleaner and appear better maintained than taxi
cabs – which are often smelly, dinged-up, and messy – government regulations
notwithstanding.

Finally, in reading the arguments of the cab industry,
this isn’t about safety. Rather it is about
a protection racket to bottleneck entry into the marketplace and thus inflate
prices, a cartelization that is detrimental to the consumer and stifling to the
economy. It is not government’s job to economically
manipulate an industry so as to inflate prices.
The fact that cab companies are not joining us to call for reduction or
abolition of regulations is evidence of this fact. They can afford the costs of compliance,
where a part-time Uber or Lyft driver – perhaps a single mom, or a person
saving to buy a house, or a professional person defraying healthcare costs –
cannot.

Again, if a person feels calling an Uber or Lyft to be
risky, he or she can continue to call a cab.
I still see a lot of cabs while I am out driving. It is the nature of competition to increase
innovation and cause prices to fall for customers. By contrast, it is the nature of monopolies
and cartels to stifle innovation and delink customer service from the product
being offered.

In short, ride-sharing is here to stay. It is not going to go away from Orleans
Parish, but it could leave Jefferson Parish.
If that happens, count on tourists avoiding Jefferson Parish hotels and Jefferson
Parish restaurants and bars – since they will have to take a cab instead of a
ride-share. Ride-sharing is used successfully
around the country and world. It is part
of the evolving business model of peer-to-peer marketing. Change is hard to navigate, especially for
government, which itself is under no pressure to innovate and streamline. But I do believe in this case, the people and
government of Jefferson Parish will be well-served by welcoming Lyft and Uber,
but will be ill-served by regulating them out of Jefferson Parish.

I would also like to make the political argument that
Uber and Lyft are extremely popular.
This is an issue that people will not just shrug and walk away
from. If you kill ride-sharing, I do
believe that you will pay for it at election time. There are just certain issues that are political
hot-potatoes. I believe this is one of
them.

I urge you to either deregulate the car-transportation
industry, or take a minimalist approach (perhaps like Orleans Parish) with our
commerce and thereby encourage and enjoy the benefits to our economy, to the
people of the parish, to drivers, and to your own standing with your constituents.

Thank you,

Rev. Larry L. Beane II

Note: If you would also like to write to the Jefferson Parish Council regarding what you think about ride-sharing and how it might affect your potential visits to Jefferson Parish, here is the info,,,

Sunday, August 07, 2016

The
basis of any kind of thinking or doing anything in this life is to accept
reality. Things are what they are. If you need a small Phillips screwdriver to
do a job, no amount of wishful thinking is going to make a sledgehammer do the
trick. Things will probably not end
well.

The
importance of accepting reality is also the case in matters of faith. Dr. Luther once said that a true theologian,
a theologian of the cross, calls a thing what it is.

One
of the most popular expressions among Louisianans is the concession, “It is
what it is.”

It
is what it is.

Of
course, nowadays we are told that things are not what they are, but what they are
identified as. This is why such formerly
uncontroversial topics such as men’s and ladies’ restrooms are now topics for
the Supreme Court to figure out. For
nowadays, especially with human beings, it is becoming controversial to say
that a person is this or that, even when reality itself says so.

Our
Lord’s Parable, “The Pharisee and the Tax Collector”, could also be called “It
Is What It Is.” Of the two characters in
the Lord’s story, one of them is a true theologian of the cross, while the
other is condemned to hell because he has not been “justified.” And like many
of the Lord’s short stories, your expectations are challenged.

Let’s
consider the Lord’s story in which two men come to the Temple to pray.

The
first man is a Pharisee. This means he
is a very clean-cut religious guy. He “stands by himself” – which is a way of
saying that he perceives himself to be holy, that is, set apart from other
men. And in fact, he thanks God for that
kind of separation: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men” – and then
he lists a bunch of sins that he thanks God that he doesn’t commit. Then he regales God with a litany of his own
good works: “I fast… I give tithes.”

In
fact, our Lord actually instructs us Christians to pray, to fast, and to give
alms, teaching us this in the Sermon on the Mount. And so our Pharisee is obviously doing all
three.

But
the Pharisee is not addressing reality in his own self-examination. For the Lord Jesus Christ invents this
character as a rebuke to “some who trusted in themselves that they were
righteous, and treated others with contempt.”

Where
is our Pharisee’s trust? Is it in the
blood of the sacrifice? Is it in the
grace and mercy of the Lord? Is it in
the promises of God revealed to the prophets and in the Scriptures? Or is his faith ultimately a faith in
himself, in his supposed goodness, and in his own works?

And
what is our Pharisee’s view of others?
Does he treat the struggling tax collector with love and
encouragement? Or is he using prayer as
an excuse to insult the tax collector who has come seeking the mercy of God?

Before
we can really think too much about the Pharisee, the Lord introduces us to
another character, a tax collector. This
means that he is a dirty collaborator with the enemy, a cheat and a thief, a
liar, and one greedy for gain who intimidates and threatens his way to other
people’s money.

And
notice that the tax collector stands “far off” – perceiving himself to be
damaged goods and unclean, unworthy of the holiness of God’s presence. He won’t even raise his eyes for fear of
offending God on account of his sins. He
beats his breast, a sign of sorrow. And
he makes no reference to the sins he is innocent of, to the guilt of others, or
to claimed good works. Instead, he cries
out simply: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

In
his humility, the tax collector faces the reality of his own sinful condition,
one that no man is exempt from, corruption springing from Adam and Eve, and
carried about by every man ever born of woman with one sole Exception – who is
Himself telling the parable.

Our
tax collector does not trust in himself, but in the mercy of God as his only
hope of righteousness. He does not
attack or insult the Pharisee, but simply focuses on his own sins and his own
need for a Savior.

The
Lord Jesus Christ dies on the cross for every fallen son of Adam and daughter
of Eve. The sins of all have been paid
for by the blood of the one who not only tells parables but who works
forgiveness by His atoning death on the cross.
And what’s more, He has been raised from death for our justification, a
justification that is applied to every poor miserable sinner ever born.

And
yet, our Lord says something very exclusive and shocking to modern ears: one of
these men is not justified. One of these
men is bound for hell. Only one of these
men goes down to his house having received the free gift of justification that
Jesus has won for everyone.

“Everyone
who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be
exalted.”

Who
has exalted himself, dear friends? Was
it the religious Pharisee or the filthy tax collector? Who has humbled himself? Our aloof self-righteous braggart or our
broken and sorrowful tax collector?

Which
of these two men acknowledges the reality about himself? Which is the real theologian of the
cross? Before one can repent and believe
the Gospel, as our Lord preaches to us, one must see the reality of who he
is. The tax collector saw reality, confessed
reality, and received the reality that Jesus has forgiven his sins and won for
him everlasting life. The Pharisee
ignored reality and followed a fantasy, identifying himself with something not
real, and thus there is no repentance here, and no desire for God’s mercy.

The
tragedy is that Jesus truly justified the Pharisee on the cross, but the
Pharisee chose instead to justify himself with a lie. And as a result, he never asks for that which
God would gladly give him: mercy, forgiveness, and eternal life.

Dear
friends, the Christian faith is not about self-righteousness and earning a
place in heaven by good works. The
Christian faith is not about seeing oneself as good and looking down at others. For this is to deny reality. The Christian faith is receiving the mercy of
God because we need that mercy. We lack
righteousness on our own. For we are
sinners. That is the reality. But Jesus
has come to save sinners and restore us to life. It is what it is.

We
Christians call a thing what it is. We
confess the simple reality of the Gospel.
We are not justified by anything other than the mercy of God which we
receive only in humility. “God, be
merciful to me, a sinner!”

Yes,
indeed, it is what it is! Thanks be to
God! Amen.

In the name of the Father
and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

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Why Father Hollywood?

While serving in a previous ministerial call, I had to moonlight at the local Hollywood Video to pay for health insurance for the family. It took one of my coworkers a couple weeks before she stopped addressing me as "Father" and started using my first name.
It was a fun job. My co-workers were the best. I got free rentals too. You can click here to see a picture. Now you know the rest of the story...